Paris (AFP)

A hundred French personalities, associated with representatives of patients, claim an "emergency plan to save the public hospital" in an open letter to Emmanuel Macron published Wednesday by the Parisian.

Charlotte Gainsbourg, Véronique Sanson, Vincent Lindon, Florence Foresti, Richard Bohringer and Thomas Piketty are among the 108 personalities who signed this letter, with around 40 patient representatives, in support of "white coats on the verge of a nervous breakdown", explains the daily.

"The situation on the ground has become really untenable: the difficulties of access to care are increasing, the quality and safety of care is deteriorating and we are observing the exhaustion and the anxiety of the hospital staff," write the signatories.

The personalities, who have been confronted with the hospital world, ask for the opening of beds, the hiring of the necessary personnel, the revaluation of the salaries of the personnel. "The public hospital needs reforms but also and especially means to ensure its missions in conditions acceptable to patients and caregivers," they conclude in their mail.

This letter was drafted at the initiative of the inter-hospital collective, including 400 doctors heads of service, who had claimed on 22 September the "States General" of the public hospital.

Neat for a throat cancer diagnosed at the end of 2018, Véronique Sanson told the Parisian that "many" nurses are "on the verge of burnout". "They give everything, we give them nothing ... They are paid for peasants!", Observes the singer, who addresses the Head of State: "Mr. Macron, if one day you are sick, you will see what c is that being a night nurse, you will see what is the reality of the public hospital ".

Asked to react on France Inter, the Minister of Health Agnès Buzyn stressed that hospital rates, ie the amounts reimbursed each year to hospitals by the Health Insurance, "increased last year for the first time "for 10 years, and they" will do it again this year ".

"I am the minister who is investing in the hospital," defended Ms. Buzyn. "We are putting an extra $ 1.5 billion this year, as we put it last year," she said.

Furthermore, "I am also working on the conditions of work, the salaries at the beginning of the career, the quality of life at work of the carers, their prospects of evolution (...) all this is in progress, there will be significant changes in the coming year, "said the minister.

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